Your dear thoughts have now effaced That beauty that so won me at the outset.

Edmond Rostand -- Cyrano de Bergerac

Footsteps were easily printed on the snow! But soon, under a new sheet, every imprint would be effaced.

Jules Verne -- Around the World in 80 Days

What was any tyranny of prison compared with the tyranny of the past, of the thing that had happened and could not be recalled, of the memory that could never be effaced!

Upton Sinclair -- The Jungle

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Nor could they efface the images that lingered in Pedro and Tita’s minds, marking them forever.

Laura Esquivel -- Like Water for Chocolate

The fresh beauty of the following morning did something to efface from our minds the grim and gray impression which had been left upon both of us by our first experience of Baskerville Hall.

Arthur Conan Doyle -- The Hound of the Baskervilles

Then I saw a shadow flit across her face, and she drew back against the wall, effacing herself, as a step sounded outside and Maxim came into the room.

Daphne du Maurier -- Rebecca

Glancing at her-myopic, spinsterish, effaced-I wondered how she knew she had graduated at all, and, unlike her clients, was whole and well.

Sylvia Plath -- The Bell Jar

They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

Kate Chopin -- The Awakening

...and after a little meditation during which his wrinkles were pursed as into a point, quite effacing for the time that quizzing expression his face sometimes wore,

Herman Melville -- Billy Budd

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The little woman hoped they would have a good house. She looked out at the rain until the melancholy of the wet street effaced all the trustfulness and enthusiasm from her twisted features. Then she gave a little sigh and said:"Ah, well! We did our best, the dear knows."

James Joyce -- Dubliners

...and efface his name and lineage from the earth.

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

Without any resort to tricks or to false emphasis, she set herself to efface the newcomer. ... Her personality became so electric that if she so much as laid her hand upon that of a fellow actor a sympathetic shudder ran through the audience.

Thornton Wilder -- The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The tone of her prose, tender and effacing, is colored by the devotion of one who has dedicated her life to another’s art.

Nicole Krauss -- The History of Love

Instead, I found myself at Gracie Square on the promenade by the river, gazing as if in a trance at the municipal hideousness of the river islands, unable to efface the mangled image of Bobby Weed from my mind even as I kept murmuring—endlessly it seemed—lines from Revelation I had memorized as a boy: And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

"And one which will go far to efface the recollection of his father’s conduct," added the incorrigible marquise.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost similar impressions effaced.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

I had an obscure feeling that all was not over and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past.

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein

All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

And Planchet retired, shaking his head with an air of doubt, which the liberality of d’Artagnan had not entirely effaced.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

I don’t care that he hurt Caleb—I would have done it, too—but that he is simultaneously a man who knows how to hurt people and a man who parades around as the self— effacing leader of Abnegation, suddenly makes me so angry I can’t see straight.

Veronica Roth -- Insurgent

Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.

Stephen Crane -- The Red Badge of Courage

Without regrets she honored the obligation she felt to him and was happy to efface herself.

David Guterson -- Snow Falling on Cedars

All Lucy’s loveliness had come back to her in death, and the hours that had passed, instead of leaving traces of ’decay’s effacing fingers’, had but restored the beauty of life, till positively I could not believe my eyes that I was looking at a corpse.

Bram Stoker -- Dracula

You may think what you like, but I desire now to do all I can to efface that impression and to show that I am a man of heart and conscience.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- Crime and Punishment

"I always would have a good horse, you know," said the old gentleman, not liking that spirited time to be quite effaced from the memory of his juniors.

George Eliot -- Silas Marner

[1] After the words "agreeable to" the words "some of" were interlined and afterward effaced.

Benjamin Franklin -- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

They seemed very small, and they tried to efface themselves in outside neglect, and the wild overgrown front yards tried to hide them from the street.

John Steinbeck -- East of Eden

He has the length and leanness and luminous pallor efface that El Greco gave to his saints.

Tennessee Williams -- A Streetcar Named Desire

The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment.

Ambrose Bierce -- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Child as she was, she felt the poignancy of her friend’s grief, and with the infinite tact of her girlish tenderness, she did not try to pry into it, but was ready to efface herself.

Baroness Orczy -- The Scarlet Pimpernel

Little by little, the tide of houses, always thrust from the heart of the city outwards, overflows, devours, wears away, and effaces this wall.

Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

He could only think of her as triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse never to be effaced.

Leo Tolstoy -- Anna Karenina

I began one, ’How can I ever hope, my dear Agnes, to efface from your remembrance the disgusting impression’ — there I didn’t like it, and then I tore it up.

Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield

In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced.

Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary

Feeling that the neighbors were interested in her movements, she wished to efface the memory of yesterday’s failure by a grand success today, so she ordered the ’cherry bounce’, and drove away in state to meet and escort her guests to the banquet.

Louisa May Alcott -- Little Women

Dust billowed around her hand as she patted the ground, effacing the glyphs from the surface of the earth.

Christopher Paolini -- Brisingr

Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly-marked characteristics of middle life, and mutually assimilated them all.

Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.

Joseph Conrad -- Heart of Darkness

"I will efface myself!" he said, in a rush of almost hysterical ecstasy.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov

He sat, as the men always did in Morel’s kitchen, effacing himself rather.

D.H. Lawrence -- Sons and Lovers

Then the ventilator in the window-pane spasmodically started off for a new spin, and the pathos of Donald’s song was temporarily effaced.

Thomas Hardy -- The Mayor of Casterbridge

His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone.

Edith Wharton -- The Age of Innocence

Miss Gryce snored at last; she was a heavy Welshwoman, and till now her habitual nasal strains had never been regarded by me in any other light than as a nuisance; to-night I hailed the first deep notes with satisfaction; I was debarrassed of interruption; my half-effaced thought instantly revived.

Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre

As he descended the steps the impression which effaced his troubled self-communion was that of a mirthless mask reflecting a sunken day from the threshold of the college.

James Joyce -- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

She is told that she is still in early labor, three centimeters dilated, beginning to efface.

Jhumpa Lahiri -- The Namesake

In summer, when he joined them for a Sunday at Newport or Southampton, he was even more effaced and silent than in winter.

Edith Wharton -- The House of Mirth

Brothers and sisters, newly men and women, had to efface their sexual color and present plain miens.

Maxine Hong Kingston -- The Woman Warrior

We must accept some of the race prejudice in the South as a fact,—deplorable in its intensity, unfortunate in results, and dangerous for the future, but nevertheless a hard fact which only time can efface.